nCUBE was a series of parallel computing computers from the company of the same name. Early generations of the hardware used a custom microprocessor. With its final generations of servers, nCUBE no longer designed custom microprocessors for machines, but used server-class chips manufactured by a third party in massively parallel hardware deployments, primarily for the purposes of on-demand video.
Company history
Founding and early growth
nCUBE was founded in 1983 in Beaverton, Oregon, by a group of Intel employees (Steve Colley, Bill Richardson, John Palmer, Doran Wilde, Dave Jurasek) frustrated by Intel's reluctance to enter the parallel computing market, though Intel released its iPSC/1 in the same year as the first nCUBE was released. In December 1985, the first generation of nCUBE's hypercube machines were released. The second generation (N2) was launched in June 1989. The third generation (N3) was released in 1995. The fourth generation (N4) was released in 1999.
In 1988, Larry Ellison invested heavily in nCUBE and became the company's majority shareholder. The company's headquarters were relocated to Foster City, California, to be closer to the Oracle Corporation. In 1994, Ronald Dilbeck became CEO and set nCUBE on a fast track to an initial public offering.
Pivot to video
In 1996, Ellison downsized nCUBE. Dilbeck left and Ellison took over as acting CEO, redirecting the company to become Oracle's Network Computer division. After the network computer diversion, nCUBE resumed development on video servers. nCUBE deployed its first VOD video server in Dubai's Burj al-Arab hotel.
In 1999, nCUBE announced it was acquiring SkyConnect, a seven-year-old software company based in Louisville, Colorado, which developed digital advertising and VOD software for cable television. In the 1990s, nCUBE shifted its focus from the parallel computing market and, by 1999, had identified itself as a video on demand (VOD) solutions provider, shipping over 100 VOD systems delivering 17,000 streams and establishing a relationship with Microsoft TV. The company was once again on IPO fast-track, only to be halted again after the bursting of dot-com bubble.
Lawsuits and dot-com aftermath
In 2000, SeaChange International filed a patent infringement suit against nCUBE, alleging its nCUBE MediaCube-4 product infringed on a SeaChange patent. A jury upheld the validity of SeaChange's patent and awarded damages. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit subsequently overturned the ruling on June 29, 2005. A separate lawsuit against SeaChange was filed by nCUBE in 2001 after it acquired the patents from Oracle's interactive television division. nCUBE claimed that SeaChange's video server offering violated its VOD patent on delivery to set-top boxes. nCUBE won the lawsuit and was awarded over $2 million in damages. SeaChange appealed, but the decision was upheld in 2004.
On the business front, the dot-com bubble burst and ensuing recession as well as lawsuits meant that nCUBE was not doing well. In April 2001 nCUBE laid off 17% of its workforce and began closing offices (Foster City in 2002 and Louisville in 2003) to downsize and consolidate the company around its Beaverton manufacturing office. Also in 2002, Ellison stepped down and named former SkyConnect CEO Michael J. Pohl as CEO.
Acquired
In January 2005, nCUBE was acquired by C-COR for approximately $89.5 million, with an SEC filing for the purchase in October 2004.
In December 2007, C-COR was acquired by ARRIS.
Computer models
nCUBE 10
One of the first nCUBE machines to be released was the nCUBE 10 of late 1985. It was originally called NCUBE/ten but the name morphed over time. These were based on a set of custom chips, where each compute node had a processor chip with 32-bit ALU, a 64-bit IEEE 754 FPU, special communication instructions, and 128 KB of RAM. A node delivered 2 MIPS, 500 kiloFLOPS (32-bit single precision), or 300 kiloFLOPS (64-bit double precision). There were 64 nodes per board. The host board, based on an Intel 80286, ran Axis, a custom Unix-like operating system, and each compute node ran a 4KB kernel, Vertex.
nCUBE 10 referred to the machine's ability to build an order-ten hypercube, supporting 1,024 CPUs in a single machine. Some of the modules would be used strictly for input/output, which included the nChannel storage control card, frame buffers, and the InterSystem card that allowed nCUBEs to be attached to each other. At least one host board needed to be installed, acting as the terminal driver. It could also partition the machine into "sub-cubes" and allocate them separately to different users.